


A Bed in Summer

by pheyne



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-15
Updated: 2011-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-21 10:23:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pheyne/pseuds/pheyne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A patchwork quilt of vignettes, tracking Arthur and Eames over the years through a series of shared (sort of) hotel rooms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Bed in Summer

**Author's Note:**

> If Snapshots was the story of Arthur’s pursuit of Eames, then this is the story of Eames’ pursuit of Arthur. The stories stand by themselves, however. Warning for mention of character death. Beta by Jude. Stevenson’s poem follows at the end of the fic. Also posted at LJ.

The Beginning: Prague

The first time Eames slept with Arthur, he realised the man was arse-over-tit in love, and, while he didn’t understand Arthur’s choice in men, he was willing to respect it.  Lying next to Arthur for hours on end as he kept stiff as a board and Cobb made sounds like a sex-starved cat next door was another matter entirely, however.

This time, the headboard started thumping again sometime near the crack of dawn.  Eames startled awake to the sound of a woman’s half-muffled scream of pleasure and a lot of French encouragement.  He glanced at the bedside clock. 4:10 blinked back at him in large blue numbers.

“Oh, for the love of god.” 

He rolled onto his back and slung one arm over his eyes.  Every two hours for the past six hours.  Eames would have admired the man’s stamina if he hadn’t been so bloody tired.

He was never working with this crew again.

Peeking out from under his forearm, Eames watched Arthur pretend to sleep.  The man was intriguing really.  Absurdly young.  Frighteningly intelligent.  Thoroughly repressed.  Eames tended to take down mental notes of people’s foibles and, so far, he’d discovered that Arthur pressed his pyjamas and wore his hair shellac to bed.  Arthur was also hopelessly in love with his architect.  Dom Cobb had cheerfully introduced Eames to his fiancée and his best friend in a single breath without any apparent awareness that both were his lovers.  A fortnight of watching Arthur obsessively ensure that every detail of Cobb’s existence went as smoothly as humanly possible had convinced Eames that the man was doomed; he even managed the details of Cobb’s dry-cleaning without a shred of self-consciousness at living the cliché.

To be fair, Arthur was also beautiful, gifted with the sort of beauty that ran bone deep.  Even now, the faint glow from the streetlight outside their crap hotel room picked out with knee-weakening detail the sharp, elegant lines of his jaw and cheekbones, the delicate arch of his brow, and the hint of vulnerability in the gentle curve of his lower lip.  So, Eames’ frustration may well have been, in part, jealousy.  A fortnight without sex while treated to a nightly reminder that his co-workers indulged regularly tended to do that to him.

Of course, he’d be barmy to sleep with the man.  Of course, Eames had been thinking of little else for the past two weeks.

Eames didn’t form personal rules as such but he tried to keep from fucking those with whom he worked.  Workplace sex tended to erode into petty, sniping commentary and uncomfortable silences that made days feel like an eternity, not to mention frequently inspiring Eames’ return to an unhealthy scotch habit.  Still, he’d decided he wasn’t working with this crowd again, and his relationship with Arthur could already be described as pear-shaped.  This was their last night, and Eames believed that fortune very often favoured the bold.  No one slept as if they had been steam-pressed into the sheets anyway.

“We could just join in and shag,” he offered with a pleasant smile.

Arthur turned to look at him with eyes that were brimming with emotion and very possibly unshed tears.  _Bugger_.  Absolutely doomed.  For one heart-stopping moment, Eames feared that Arthur might actually take him up on his offer.  Thankfully, Arthur only closed his eyes and rolled over, offering Eames a fine view of his slender back and spectacular arse instead.  Eames let out the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

Never working with this crew again.  _Definitely_.

 

Rio de Janeiro

Eames met Cobb and Arthur at the airport even though he generally deplored doing that sort of thing.  It made him feel like a commercial valet, one of those badly dressed, sour-faced men who stood at airport arrival queues bearing placards and chain-smoking cheap fags.  He did it because Arthur had sounded truly gutted over the phone which was sufficiently unlike the man that Eames had been intrigued.

Why Arthur had chosen to call Eames, of all people, remained a mystery.

He caught sight of them the moment they walked through the doors from baggage claim into the main airport terminal.  Cobb looked devastated, barely acknowledging Eames when he took the man’s bag.  Arthur looked neat as a pin, as always, but his stride was brisker than usual, and he vibrated with nervous energy.  The perfect tailoring of his waistcoat simply added to the overall impression of a tightly coiled spring.  They had brought Mal Cobb’s ghost with them, a palpable presence in the thick swirl of memories binding the two men.

For one brief moment, Eames seriously considered walking out and leaving them to their fate.  He didn’t because it felt a bit like watching a multi-car pile-up on the M4.

“You booked us rooms where?” Arthur asked with a frown as Eames navigated his battered VW through the traffic.  Cobb sat behind them, staring blindly out the window and looking every inch a dead man.

“I thought you said you needed to keep a low profile.”

“Low profile, Eames.  Not in the gutter.”

“It’s Carnivale, Arthur.”  Carnivale in a fucking waistcoat, no less. The man was a walking advert for American repression.  “You’re lucky I found us rooms in this city at all.”

That time, Arthur shared a room with Cobb, which seemed reasonable given that the man was barely capable of placing one foot in front of the other and looked as if he already regretted his decision to not leap to his death by his wife’s side.  Eames slept in the adjoining room.  The next morning, he watched Arthur put together a plate of food from the hotel breakfast bar for Cobb that would likely go uneaten and tried to decide if he was disappointed or relieved that the headboard hadn’t thumped through the night after all.

 

Tijuana

Eames adored hot weather.  Not simply warm weather but scorching, sweat-soaked-to-the-bone, dehydrated-simply-from-waiting-for-the-bus hot weather.  It likely had something to do with a childhood spent shivering under rainy grey skies and struggling with jumpers that smelled of sheep but he’d never paused to analyse it.  When he returned to their motel room after two days spent trailing after their mark, however, Eames found Arthur flat on his back on a piñata-coloured bedspread, eyes closed, and he suspected, for the first time, that his love of all things sweltering might not be shared.

“Arthur?”  Eames shut the door behind him, plunging the room back into darkness.  “Enjoying a kip?”

“Who can sleep in this heat?  I’m begging for peace.”

“What’s Cobb done now?”

“Same thing he always does.”  Arthur opened one eye to stare at him.  “You smell of dead rat.  Where did you follow Adams to anyway?”

Eames’ eyes gradually adjusted to the dim lighting, and he took in Arthur’s rolled-up shirtsleeves and sweat-streaked hair with only a brief pang of lust.  The man was still beautiful, after all . . . beautiful and certifiable and definitely still Cobb’s.  As he watched, Arthur sat up and arched a brow at him, propping himself up on his elbows.  Eames shrugged.  Two days spent living on the streets of Tijuana hardly left anyone smelling like roses.

Still, Arthur had a point.  He reeked of rotten cabbage for reasons best not dwelt on.  Eames toed off his shoes and tugged off his shirt as he went to claim ownership of the bathroom.

“I think I have our four-hour window.  He likes to indulge an absolutely vicious drug habit nightly at a club called La Nuevo Cantina.  If we can manage to get him alone there . . . Arthur, do _not_ chuck my shirt in the bin.”

Arthur paused, holding up the admittedly fragrant garment exactly as if it were slain vermin.

“It’s unsalvageable, Eames.  And close the door, would you?  Steam is just going to make the smell in here worse.”

Eames was not actually a vain man.  He understood that most people found him attractive and was not above using that fact for his own gain.  He viewed his appearance as a tool, something to be manipulated in the course of a job; he’d be a terrible forger if he became attached to one particular look or demeanour.  However, standing in their cupboard-sized bathroom, half-undressed, with Arthur staring at him as if he were last week’s rubbish left out to rot, Eames struggled to overcome the feeling of being deeply insulted and failed.

“Well, there’s not much of a point to cleaning up simply to step back out into an Amazonian sauna, is there?  The bath has absolutely no ventilation to speak of.”

“Neither does the bedroom.”

“Then open a window.”

“Are you serious?  The air outside is worse.”

“I’d tell you to turn on the air-con except there isn’t one.  You would think that would be the sort of information a point man who despised hot weather would research before making hotel reservations.”

“This isn’t a hotel.  It’s a hovel.  And if there had been any five-star accommodations available in Tijuana this week, we’d be in them,” Arthur replied, now scowling.  “Are you closing the door or not?”

“Not, I think.”

Eames stripped off his trousers before Arthur could manage to get in the next word and stepped inside the shower stall.  He sighed as the water hit his back.  Despite the boiling temperature outside, the hot water felt heavenly.  Arthur momentarily forgotten, he leaned forward, pressed his hands flat against the faded tile, and let the pulsating showerhead pound the tension from his shoulders.  Trailing marks always left him on edge.  So did rooming with Arthur.  The man was sex and aggravation on the hoof.  Next time, Eames would demand his own room.  Definitely.

All too soon, however, the hot water ran out, and Eames reluctantly reached for a towel.  He stepped out as he patted himself dry and found Arthur leaning against the door, arms folded and face flushed.

“A little privacy, Arthur?”

Of course, Arthur ignored him, eyes dropping to Eames’ hips and looking more than a little wild.  He swallowed, licked his slender lips, and, just like that, Eames was painfully hard.  When he spoke, Arthur’s voice was rough and unfamiliar. 

“That tat . . . the one on your back.  How far down does it go, exactly?”

In a lifetime bookmarked with bad ideas, this was his worst.  There were excellent reasons for not getting involved with Arthur; Eames had whiled away more than one trans-oceanic flight picking them off in detail.  Sadly, none of them occurred to him at the moment, and the combination of heat and over-work had sapped him of what little self-restraint he possessed.  Eames dropped his towel and pulled Arthur to him, grinning when Arthur let him smudge wet handprints across his hideously expensive shirt without so much as a whimper.

“Why don’t you see for yourself, darling?” he murmured against Arthur’s perfect shell of an ear.

“Eames,” Arthur breathed in a whisper.

His eyes locked onto Eames’ mouth as he wrapped one hand around Eames’ neck and tugged him even closer.  Eames could almost taste Arthur’s breath when the man’s mobile rang out.  _American Idiot_.  Eames had programmed the ring tone himself in a fit of pique earlier in the week.  Arthur startled, would have fallen except for Eames’ tight grip on his hips.

“Ignore it.”                                                                       

“I can’t.  You know it’s Dom.”

“So what?”

Arthur executed some near-lethal ninja-like manoeuvre that barely left his bits intact.  Eames stumbled back and let him go.  He watched, slightly nauseated, bitter regret flooding his veins, as Arthur plucked his mobile from the dresser and walked from the room without a backward glance.

 

Paris

Not unexpectedly, Paris was an unmitigated disaster, beginning with their reason for having to share a room at all.

“I just don’t get why you were taking a bath anyway,” Arthur complained, tossing Eames’ travel bag on the other twin bed. 

Eames followed him into the room and kept his expression bland even though he was seething, had been seething since he arrived from Mombasa to find Arthur still playing dutiful lapdog.

“Why, Arthur, I thought you valued personal hygiene.”

“I meant . . . normal people take showers, Eames.  _You_ take showers.”

They stared at each other as memories of Tijuana drifted between them, some so sharp Eames almost winced. 

“Bath or shower, it’s hardly my fault the plumbing was buggered, darling.  Besides, that isn’t really the reason why you’re currently screaming at me, is it?”

“I am not screaming,” Arthur muttered, dialling down his tone several decibels regardless.  “And, aside from the fact that I was actually looking forward to graduating to my own room on this job for a change . . . okay, fine, I am a little confused as to why you’re leading Dom on with this whole inception idea.”

“I’m not leading him anywhere.”

“He wouldn’t be doing this without you.  You know that.  He wouldn’t have clue number one how to.”

“That’s encouraging,” Eames murmured dryly.  Arthur scowled.

“ _And_ you keep coming up with bullshit I can’t work with.  I mean, what was it with you fucking with me today about wanting a little fucking specificity, anyway.  When your ass gets served to you on a platter, just how am I supposed to do anything about it if I have no fucking clue what you’re trying to do in the first place?”

Eames was better than this in an argument.  He understood that there were topics of conversation he and Arthur had tacitly agreed would be off the books years ago.  But Arthur was bloody lovely in a temper, and Eames felt magnificently fucked off, perhaps unjustifiably, that he still catered to Cobb’s increasingly insane whims.

“It’s not really _my_ arse you’re worried about, is it?”

“Am I supposed to understand what that means?”

“Oh, come on, Arthur.  You’ve been helping the man run around the globe for two years, evading authorities that have no interest in you whatsoever while risking life and limb.  No one does that.”

“It’s called friendship, Eames.  And loyalty.  Maybe you’ve forged those before.”

Arthur’s smile was a snarl, and they stood toe-to-toe now.

“It’s called money . . . and while your wardrobe is admittedly extravagant,” Eames ran his eyes over Arthur’s sleek lines as if he were a five-dollar whore on the Vegas strip.  “You haven’t spent that much on it.”

Arthur’s complexion rapidly approached volcanic.

“At least I don’t go around in public wearing Salvation Army remnants.”

“Or there’s sex.  Although the fact that we are currently standing in your hotel room and there is no evidence of Cobb . . . not even a bottle of slick or a used condom, darling . . . suggests that if there has been sex, which I profoundly doubt, it most certainly hasn’t been safe.”

“Like you’re getting laid every damn night.”

“Unrequited passion has always been your particular poison of choice, hasn’t it?  It’s just as well Cobb’s never found the time to fuck you.  As uptight as you are, you’d probably snap the man’s cock in two if he ever decided to shove it up your arse.”

“You _fuck_ ,” Arthur spat at him then, eyes flat.

Eames barrelled on, tragically inspired.

“So, I believe the question becomes are you angry with me because you truly believe inception will fail and possibly cost you your long-awaited opportunity with the wanker . . . or because you believe it will succeed and you’ll lose him anyway.”

Arthur’s first punch landed on his cheek with enough force to rock Eames’ head back and shoot silver stars across his horizon.  He felt at least somewhat vindicated when his return blow caught Arthur’s patrician little nose and started the blood flowing.  They finished up wrecking the room and being asked to leave the hotel.  Eviction was a relief in a way; Eames preferred sleeping in the gents at the Metro to sharing a bedroom with a Cobb-obsessed Arthur.

 

Seattle

Arthur picked him up at the airport in a sleek, silver Hennessey Venom GT.

“Yours?” Eames asked with a bland smile.  He knew the answer; Arthur’s obsession with things that went very, very fast was legendary.

They hadn’t spoken since the Fischer job and, while he could live quite nicely with being hated in general, Eames preferred that his relationship with Arthur settle to at least polite tolerance.  With that in mind, opening their first conversational gambit in six months by mentioning that it was a good thing Eames travelled light since the bloody car lacked any boot space at all seemed ill-advised.

“Yeah.  I decided to drive up from San Francisco after all.”  Arthur paused.  “I didn’t think you’d come to this.  Kids’ birthday parties don’t seem your thing.”

“I was in the area,” Eames lied.

Arthur’s frown said he knew the lie, knew Eames had been in Mumbai when Cobb had called with the invite, casually mentioning that Arthur was acting as the party planner so Pippa’s tenth birthday was likely to be epic.  Eames had never tied up a job so quickly before.

“I booked us rooms at the Doubletree,” Arthur said.  “It’s only a mile or so from Dom’s.”

“You aren’t staying with Cobb?”

Eames watched Arthur’s knuckles whiten as his grip tightened on the leather-clad steering.

“It’s no big deal,” he finally managed.  “Miles has the guest room, and Ariadne’s staying there, of course.”

Ah, Ariadne.  If Eames had ever suffered doubts that Cobb lacked a moral compass, Ariadne’s happy call to inform him of her new status as Cobb’s latest doomed romance had resolved them.  Eames stared at Arthur’s sharp profile, thought of Prague, and decided to try fortune’s favour one more time after all.

“Brilliant.  Why don’t you have dinner with me tonight, then?”

Arthur gave him a sidelong glance.  A heavy silence fell between them.  Eames started to assume the worst.

“Fine but I’m keeping my own room,” Arthur finally said with a small smile that still carried a hint of sadness. 

Eames didn’t care.  The smile came with dimples, after all.  He’d sort the rest later.

 

New York City

“The Waldorf Astoria, Arthur?” Eames gasped because Arthur was already slamming him back against the hotel door and unfastening his trousers.  “Should I be carrying you over the threshold?”

“Ass,” Arthur muttered, yanking at trousers, underpants . . . everything. 

“You have only to ask.”

“Please shut up and I’ll let you order room service in the morning.”

Arthur dropped to his knees.

Then that unbelievable mouth wrapped around Eames’ cock, and he was fighting to keep upright.  He glanced down, his vision narrowed to the sight of Arthur with his cheeks hollowed taut to pull at Eames, his long lashes feathered soft against his cheeks, and his pianist’s hands gripped tight around Eames’ bare hips.  He caught a glint of gold from the simple band around Arthur’s fourth finger. 

 _Sodding traditionalist_. 

Sadly, that was all it took.  Eames screamed his devotion, his fear, and his joy to the hotel ceiling as he came in Arthur’s mouth.  He returned to reality to the sound of Arthur’s laughter, which beat the bloody hell out of Edith Piaf, and the feel of soft, thousand-count sheets against his bare arse.

“I love you,” Arthur whispered against his shoulder without reservation or hesitation.

Eames tilted back his head, closed his eyes, and smiled as Arthur traced the swirls of ink on his skin with his lips.

 

The Last Time

Cobb’s funeral was brief and small.  Arthur said a few words in the biblical downpour that had fittingly accompanied the lowering of Cobb’s casket into the gaping hole next to Mal.  Reunited at last.  Eames kept silent during the drive back to their hotel and waited until Arthur began undoing his cufflinks by moonlight before speaking.

“Darling?”

Arthur smiled sadly and shook his head.  The lines bracketing his mouth spoke of hard-won years of friendship and love and the fresh fear of losing both.

“I’m fine.  It’s nothing.  Hell, we’ve all lived a lot longer than I ever thought we would.  At the beginning.”

The beginning.  The thought made Eames smile, too.

“Do you remember Prague?” he asked.

Arthur laughed softly.  “Yeah.  You asked if I wanted a pity fuck.”

Eames went to him then, ran a hand across the still slender, still strong shoulders, and leaned forward to rest his chin on the curve between Arthur’s neck and shoulder.  He stared at their half-illuminated reflections in the hotel mirror.

“It wouldn’t have been a pity fuck.”

Arthur shrugged.  They had moved beyond this long ago.

“Arthur.” 

Those dark eyes, still so brimming with emotion, rose up to meet his in the mirror, and, suddenly, Eames didn’t see the years, the grey, or the wrinkles that they had both acquired.  Instead, he saw a Prague streetlight and the elegant curve of a jaw clenched against tears.  They fit so well, linked together by limbs and history and agonising sentiment, that Eames only needed to tilt his head to seal those links with a kiss.

♥

 **Bed in Summer**

In winter I get up at night  
And dress by yellow candle-light.  
In summer quite the other way,  
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see  
The birds still hopping on the tree,  
Or hear the grown-up people's feet  
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,  
When all the sky is clear and blue,  
And I should like so much to play,  
To have to go to bed by day?

 **Robert Louis Stevenson**


End file.
